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Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
31–40 of 83 posts
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#32What is it with all the Game of Life posts lately? There seems to be a new one every other day. Not that it's a bad thing, I think the GOL is a marvellous thing and the SmoothLife video was mesmerizing. I'm just wondering why they all pop up at the same time?
I'm sure there is a "game of life" like biological algorithm that can explain this and the flow of articles in the form of "X in GO" or "Don't use MongoDB" or "Y in pure CSS"
e.g. perhaps people see what's top on HN (a legitimate article) and search on the topic, and increase the probability of more posts in that topic, also, psychologically, if A is popular, then when seeing something that looks like A you might up vote it just by assuming it's popular too.
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#33Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...
> So I made a demo and started showing my co-workers what it was and realized that some of them had never seen the Game of Life before.
So let me get this straight, there are Google software engineers, that passed all the 3 month interview process which some considered the toughest in the world, and they never have heard of conway's game of life.
this makes me feel a little better about myself now.
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#34There appears to be a semi-persistent "Google" text - when I cleared out the 'G' it was recreated within 20 steps by the neighbouring 'o'. Can't possibly be organic can it? E: it seems to always appear like that; so probably not organic and I'm not up for searching minified sources to verify.
It always appears like that because he's written it so that when the "Google" cells are active, they appear darker than normal active cells. Whether these cells get activated or not follow the normal rules of Conway's game of live. So yeah, it's organic, but with a little trickery, the "Google" stands out as the pixels in the area blink on and off. You can confirm this by pausing the simulation and clicking on all th…
It appears that there is some sort of spawning behavior near the darkened "Google" tiles. I paused, turned off all the cells in the region (taking into account wrapping from the other side) and let it go. Cells started activating near the 'e'.
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#35Here's the interview I published with the creator! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-google-engineer-b...
> So I made a demo and started showing my co-workers what it was and realized that some of them had never seen the Game of Life before. So let me get this straight, there are Google software engineers, that passed all the 3 month interview process which some considered the toughest in the world, and they never have heard of conway's game of life. this makes me feel a little better about myself now.
Hehehe
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#36Predicting the next HN front page article in the near future: "Show HN: weekend project - open source Google's conway's game of life"
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#37Added to my list, thanks. http://www.pixelbeat.org/misc/google_search_easter_eggs.html
Search "number of horns on a unicorn", it gives a google calculator result of 1.
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
RWW: So it took two months to do this? PD: It’s not a trivial problem. It’s tricky. I’m quite proud of the way I did it. I can’t talk about the way we actually implemented it. (laughs) I wonder how they implemented it so that it renders so efficiently.
I figured caching the results of common patterns appearing in blocks of 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, etc. pixels which are surrounded by all 'off' pixels, you can easily skip many repetitive calculations. ---- ---- -oo- =\ -oo- -oo- =/ -oo- ---- ---- ----- ----- ----- --o-- ----- --o-- --o-- =\ -ooo- =\ --o-- --o-- =/ ----- =/ --o-- ----- ----- ----- ------ ------ ------ -oo--- -oo--- -oo--- -oo--- =\ -o---- =\ -oo--- ---oo- =/ --…
Here is a CoffeeScript implementation of Hashlife
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meeeeee, too. Me, too. Believe me, I tried.
Can you talk about what is difficult about it? I know that Windows game of life programs can use hashes of positions to compute new steps even for massive worlds very efficiently. Is the JS difficulty with the graphics on the canvas? Or something else?
He wouldn't give me any specifics at all, but I can tell you that the challenge was related to the extremely low tolerance for lag on a search result page that's treated as law company-wide. He had to do it without slowing down the search page AT ALL, for anybody. Check it out; it even works on mobile.
Re: Googling for "conway's game of life" gives a simulation in the results page
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you talk about what is difficult about it? I know that Windows game of life programs can use hashes of positions to compute new steps even for massive worlds very efficiently. Is the JS difficulty with the graphics on the canvas? Or something else?
He wouldn't give me any specifics at all, but I can tell you that the challenge was related to the extremely low tolerance for lag on a search result page that's treated as law company-wide. He had to do it without slowing down the search page AT ALL, for anybody. Check it out; it even works on mobile.
Oh, I thought you meant you tried to implement something like this and had trouble. LOL. Well, thanks.